President Joe Biden said he intends to appoint former North Carolina health chief Mandy Cohen as the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The White House’s sign-off on Cohen comes just two weeks before the scheduled departure of CDC Director Rochelle Walensky at the end of June, following the termination of the US Covid-19 public health emergency. Bloomberg News reported earlier that Cohen had been formally selected.
“Dr. Cohen is one of the nation’s top physicians and health leaders with experience leading large and complex organizations, and a proven track-record protecting Americans’ health and safety,” Biden said in a statement, applauding her ability to find common ground between political parties and “put complex policy into action.”
A graduate of Cornell, Yale and Harvard, Cohen is an internal-medicine doctor who formerly headed North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services, where she played an important role in the state’s Medicaid expansion and pandemic response. She was also chief operating officer and chief of staff at the the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under former President Barack Obama.
She’s now an executive vice president at Aledade and CEO of Aledade Care Solution, which supports primary care practices across the country. She’ll be able to assume the role of CDC director without Senate confirmation.
Cohen’s experience “make her perfectly suited to lead CDC as it moves forward by building on the lessons learned from Covid-19 to create an organization poised to meet public health challenges of the future,” Walensky, an infectious-disease expert who led the CDC through the pandemic emergency for more than two years, said in a statement.
Read More: Biden to Tap Mandy Cohen for CDC Chief, Replacing Walensky
Cohen is poised to face scrutiny as she leads the agency, which endured criticism for its performance during the pandemic, including its messaging to the public and development and distribution of Covid tests.
“We need a culture change at the CDC and Mandy Cohen needs to show quickly that she is up to the task,” Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said in a statement. “It’s not going to happen over Zoom. We need a leader, in-person in Atlanta, who understands public health and is independent from political interests.”
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